If you look at my art page on instagram, it's clear that I go through periods of doing a lot of traditional art and then a lot of digital art, but they aren't really interspersed anymore. Lately I've been starting to more towards a lot more digital art for a couple of reasons.
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This is sort of just a reflection on my recent art, and a throwback to an old blog post I made a while back, with a slight variance. This week has been extremely busy, mostly because of my involvement with theatre, so I only have a very small amount of time for art, which means I either have to make slow progress, or...
I can make fast art! This simply means focusing on hitting deadlines is a higher priority than quality (though, don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to throw quality out of the window). Doing this wasn't actually planned on my part, instead, I had deadlines approach much faster than I had anticipated and was forced to work this way if I valued my sanity. However, this also meant that I have produced 6 gif animations and another digital art piece in the past 3 days or so, most of them being very busy days as well. Sure, they aren't perfect, but I hit the deadlines I needed to hit, and I actually learned a lot about how I work/ what I need to improve on. For instance, the unanimated piece of art showed me that I'm better at lineart than I thought, but also am still struggling with making distinct shading. The gifs proved to me that animation, while it can be a lengthy and arduous process, can happen even in short bursts of productivity, and thus, even if I don't have much time, having even a little time means that I can work towards larger artistic goals. For the rest of the school year, I want to try to do more fast art, this time with self-imposed deadlines in order to improve faster. As I talked about in the blog post linked above, I strongly believe that not being so meticulous and just getting in a ton of practice definitely helps me improve more quickly. Below are two of the gifs I made. There are lots of aspects of both that could be HUGELY improved, but they provided me practice in animation, and allowed me to see what I need to work on in the future. This week, I got the chairs simplified and textured, made some weird fish art, and then spent some time making textures for posters that would go around the school. I personally think that the chairs look pretty good, even if they aren't so real to life. I decided low poly count was more important than realism in this particular case, so that's what I did. I still need to send them over to Ryan via flash drive though, but since I'm writing this in class, I may still get that done today. The fish art is a model made to resemble an art project that is done at our school a lot. I also made these goofy posters to go around the school, with messages that fall under the category of "ominous positivity." I may remake the dog and chicken one, because both of those images do require attribution and it may be better to use images that do not. However, at the same time, this game is never leaving this room, so if they aren't attributed in a game that was made strictly for our own education, well, I don't think it's as unethical. I will definitely attribute them here though.
This week, I was sick, so I wasn't the most productive game designer this week. However, I did get a few things done! First, I got the stairs textured, so they can go into the game now. We were having a problem with getting assets to Ryan's computer (the computer our game is on) because for some reason, the computer no longer allows him to access google drive. Luckily, Mr. B fixed that pretty quickly by giving us a flash drive (thanks Mr. B :)). Finally, I was reminded that the chairs I made last year were very high poly and lagged out the game. I loaded up the file again, and it had Seven. Thousand. Polys. The unsimplified chicken had about half that many! So, I started simplifying away. I didn't quite get finished, but I'm sure I will be able to get it done by the beginning of this week. Most of the simplifying so far has just involved replacing spheres with cubes that are spherified and reducing the sides on cylinders. So far I've about halved the poly count, but I'm hoping to get it even smaller if these chairs are going to go in the game. Goals For This Week:
My UVW mapping skills have come in handy in texturing the stairs that Julia made!
That pretty much sums up my work this week, texturing stairs. I did also get the two items I made last week put into a unity package so that they can easily be added to the game, but that's a little less fun. This work week was a little shorter because of a guest speaker, and because I took some of the time to help Ryan with testing new player movement techniques so that we could find one that was less likely to make players sick than what we originally had. Overall, it felt like a pretty productive week though! |
AuthorHi, I'm Abi, a DSA student who likes games, drawing, writing, and acting. Archives
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